In practical e-mail usage scenarios, users oftentimes receive e-mails that contain multiple other e-mails, for instance when forwarding or replying to e-mails containing long mail threads. In scenarios wherein multiple senders participate in a specific correspondence, a user may even receive an entire mail thread more than once, or a user may receive multiple, partially overlapping mail threads from different senders. Thus, substantial data redundancy occurs when automatically handling such e-mails in a traditional way.
Systems for e-mail handling, such as IBM Lotus Domino/IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Workplace Collaboration Services/IBM Workplace Managed Client and Microsoft Exchange/Microsoft Outlook typically do not avoid such redundancies. While IBM Lotus Domino and particularly IBM Workplace offer advanced data storage functionality by providing a relational database management system, they do not provide functionality to overcome such redundancies.
Patent application publication US 2002/0073157 A1 proposes a method and apparatus for presenting e-mail threads as semi-connected text in a single document. In this system, redundancies are removed by deleting redundant individual e-mail messages. However, most redundancies still remain after the mere deletion of duplicates of e-mail messages, such as redundancy occurring in partially differing e-mail messages, or e-mail redundancy across parallel e-mail-chains which can be totally equal (the receiver has received an e-mail-chain twice from different senders) or only partially equal (if the receiver has received sub or super e-mail-chains from different senders). Further, potential attachments and its duplicates are not handled, and e-mail bodies and e-mail headers are seen in their entirety. Thus, if two e-mail bodies are not completely equal, they are treated as completely different, so that in many cases, a high degree of redundancy is stored. Furthermore, there is no appropriate and easily accessible visualization of single e-mails, e-mail chains or even e-mail threads.
Thus, conventional handling of such complex e-mail thread structures may lead to inefficient accessibility of e-mail information presented on an interface and to wastage of e-mail storage in both the e-mail server program and the e-mail client program, particularly when comprising e-mail replicating functionalities.
Consequently, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method for low-redundancy e-mail handling that reduces the amount of e-mail data to be stored to a minimum and that allows for efficient e-mail accessibility.